It is widely if not universally believed that ethical philosophy began in the seventeenth century to assume a distinctively “modern” form, opposing itself to “ancient” Greek ideas and to more recent scholastic approaches that derived in part, at least, from Aristotle. Hugo Grotius was central in shaping this modern form. Grotius’s Rights of War and Peace, published in 1625, is best known as the...

Knowledge is useless without structure. While the classification of knowledge has been an enduring philosophical enterprise, it recently found applications in computer science, notably for artificial intelligence. The availability of large databases allowed for complex ontologies to be built automatically, for example by extracting structured content from Wikipedia. However, this approach is su...

Taking a philosophical approach, ancient Greek philosophers and Christians began to investigate the concept of quality of life. Later, such philisophical pursuit was replaced by the school of positivism, which indicated that science was and still is the only valid form of enquiry. Through such positivistic science, the metaphysical nature of the concept of quality of life is thought to be uncov...

S ometimes, an important aspect of the world is so obvious that we simply take it for granted. We rarely discuss it or even think about it explicitly. In our opinion, the processual nature of reality— that it is fundamentally a sequence of interconnected occurrences or events—is one such aspect: we continually experience change, but tend instead to explain the world in terms of static things. F...